Our inaugural installment of "live" podcasting was recorded with a small audience in the library at Quarry Farm. It features Caroline Levine and Jed Esty discussing their recent books, "The Activist Humanist" and "The Future of Decline," as well as responding to the themes of "A Tale of Today" and "Criticism LTD," and discussing the roles of humanities educators in addressing climate crisis, declinism, superpower nostalgia, and shock doctrine.

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Caroline Levine, Jed Esty

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Affordances, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

The finale of our trilogy centered on Technofeudalism begins with the intersection of political economy with aesthetics and literary forms, followed by a synthesis of financial and fictive definitions of speculation [18:00], what can be done with the technofeudal thesis [27:30], the role of solidarity in the age of insecurity [33:00], the Panic of 1873 as a model [41:30], panics to come [53:00], and some final words from Yanis Varoufakis [72:00]

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Yanis Varoufakis, Jordan S. Carroll, James Livingston, Astra Taylor, Leigh Claire La Berge

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Speculators, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

An exploration of the political economy of technofeudalism begins by defining the technostructure and introducing its personification, followed by testimony from a skeptic [26:00], competing periodizations of the present [48:00], and media praxis under the rein of the cloudalists [73:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Yanis Varoufakis, James Livingston, Astra Taylor

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Technofeudalism, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

Episode opens with journalism's "race to the bottom," described by a journalist who lived it, followed by what "The Facebook Files" revealed about social media's relationship to news [8:00], the tactics of parallel journalism [27:00}, the difference between fake news and fake journalism [38:00], the fate worse than death for periodicals, but not books [48:00], what the acquisition of Twitter taught us about technofeudalism [65:00], and a call to return to institutional media [82:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Samuel Freedman, Matt Seybold, Jeff Horwitz, Gil Duran, Andie Tucher, Jeff Jarvis, Yanis Varoufakis, Tressie McMillan Cottom

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Newspapers, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

A two-part meditation on the history of journalism and the fate of investigative journalism under tech fascism begins with the model of Ida Tarbell, the epochal Wall Street Journal reporting on Facebook in 2021 [6:00], the professionalization of journalism during the Gilded Age and interbellum periods [38:00], the relationship between Silicon Valley and news organizations in the 21st century [54:00], the legacy of newspapers [63:00], and a periodization of print media [71:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Gil Duran, Matt Seybold, Jeff Horwitz, Andie Tucher, Jacob Silverman, Jeff Jarvis

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Gutenberg, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

Our 150th anniversary celebration of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's "The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" turns to political economies of mass media, then and now, beginning with a close reading of the novel's title. We are then introduced to the tech fascist fantasy of the Network State [21:00], theories of post-capitalism [47:00], ways of reading from the right [58:00], and a more optimistic technofuturism [77:00}

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Jeffrey Insko, Anna Kornbluh, Gil Duran, Eleanor Courtemanche, Jordan Carroll, Douglas Dowland, Jeff Jarvis

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/GildedNetwork, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

The second act of "A Tale of Today," focused on HBCUs and the political economy of education in Gilded Ages old and new, concludes with a journey of curiosity through the unschooling movement, a historicist close reading of Ruth Bolton's time at Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania [24:40], analysis of the transition from secondary schools to higher education [35:00], a summary of this part of the series [82:00], and hope from the forgotten migration [87:30].

Cast (in order of appearance): Astra Taylor, Matt Seybold, Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Alexander Manshel, Annie Abrams, Crystal Sanders

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/JourneyOfCuriosity, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

Following Jelani Favors's description of how the second curriculum of HBCUs has been compromised since the 1980s, we look back at the origins of Howard University in the Freedman's Bureau [10:00], discuss the labor history of literature instruction [28:00], and mark the college football playoffs by discussing the dehumanization of athletic workers with the authors of "The End of College Football" [44:30].

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Jelani Favors, Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Derek Silva

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/StudentWorkers, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

Archives, physical and digital, are suffering from austerity, enshittification, and censorship. In this episode scholars discuss the ambivalent impacts of digitization, what information matters in the data economy [8:30], an analogy involving European colonialism [23:00], the competition to document between corporations and universities [46:00], the duty to tell the truth freely [73:30], preserving the counternarratives to empire [81:00], and managing an archive through Orbanization [95:30].

Cast (in order of appearance): Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Matt Seybold, Kelly Grotke, Asheesh Kapur Siddique, Leigh Claire La Berge, Crystal Sanders, Jared Loggins, Andrew Douglas, Timothy Barber

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/ArchiveOfEmpire, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

"A Tale Of Today" returns with an episode inspired by "The Teaching Archive." Its authors discuss the pedagogical innovations of HBCUs and strategies for teaching literary history, followed by the legacy of New Historicism in the classroom [14:00], the model of the Monks of Lindisfarne [24:00], the historical rivalry between professors and journalists [36:30], the archives of HBCU student newspapers [43:00], and a reporter who spent decades on the education beat [64:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Laura Heffernan, Rachel Buurma, Matt Seybold, Jeffrey Insko, Anna Kornbluh, Eleanor Courtemanche, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jelani Favors, Samuel Freedman

Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective

Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio

For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/TeachingArchive, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com